


moving target

by wastrelwoods



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Canon Child Abuse, juno's sharpshooting, just 1.8k words of loss.jpeg, written post s2 premiere but not a spoiler for the ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 05:14:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10482885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: Juno's got good eyes. Sharp eyes.





	

_like the nagging flash of insight you're always desperate to avoid,_  
_like the bloody-knuckled gunman still stationed at the breach_  
\- spent gladiator 2, the mountain goats

*

When you're a kid in Oldtown, you're born at the bottom rung of the ladder. Lowest of the low. Most hit rock bottom before they hit twenty, skin full of pinpricks and hands covered in blood and red Martian dust. They give up on trying to climb out, accept that it's never going to happen, and let go of that bottom rung.

While they're still clinging to that ladder, though, wide-eyed and sure that one day they'll manage to pull themselves up, they turn cruel. The world doesn't have much sympathy for scrawny, ugly, mean kids. It tends to kick them while they're down. And in turn, they get into the habit of kicking the first thing that comes within reach. Stray cats, normally. 

Juno throws rocks. 

He's curled up around the iron bars of a fire escape, wiping blood from his nose onto his shirt, hurling the pebbles one by one from a pile by his feet, watching the cats in the alley below hiss and jump and look around to no avail. He hits more often than he misses. Juno's got good eyes. Sharp eyes. 

From within the house, one floor above his perch, a woman's voice sounds, sharp and sneering. Juno fumbles, and drops the rock. It clatters into a dumpster below, with an echoing thud that sends the cats scampering away. He curses under his breath, and flings one last stone. It hits one of the cats in the ear. The animal yowls, and vanishes around a corner. 

Above Juno, the window opens. He presses his back up against the bricks, shuts his eyes, and waits for it to close again. 

*

The first time he holds a blaster he's twelve. For all the shit they let Oldtown kids get up to, guns are hard to come by. He's wielded bricks, scrap metal, even knives, has been fighting with his fists for as long as he can remember, but the safety precautions on most firearms these days means even if a kid can get their hands on one, it won't fire. 

Mick's shaping up to be a real talent at stumbling into trouble, second only to Juno, but he's also got an incredible streak of luck. The blaster's one of the doctored kinds they use on the streets, safety disabled, stunning function completely non-functional. Says he picked it up off a dead body. Sasha and Juno roll their eyes, and assume he's been picking around the old munitions factory, looking for hoverbike parts. 

They all take turns firing it, laughing when the recoil sends each of them in turn stumbling backwards, leaving gritty black burn marks on the side of a wall graffitied over a dozen times. Mick almost shoots himself in the foot. 

They notice the cartridge is running low, so Sasha challenges Juno to a contest, picks out a spot in the wall and marks a line in the dust thirty feet away. It's a makeshift target, the center of a big blue letter O scrawled over the bricks. 

Neither of them have very steady hands, but when Juno squints just right, he can hit the center of the target by his third try.

Sasha, dedicated, competitive Sasha who's been rubbing Juno's nose in the dirt after every fight since they both turned nine, scowls when Juno pulls out ahead of her for the first time in his life. She's practically a natural, but Juno's better. "Good eye, Steel," she says grudgingly, dropping the cartridge into his waiting hand. 

He wears it on a string around his neck for weeks, like a medal, comes back to that spot and throws stones at the fading black scorch marks in the wall. Feels sharp and dangerous and triumphant and new. Juno's never had something to be proud of, before. 

*

First good thing he does to get out is dig Mom's old watch out of the bedside table, pawn it off and use the cash for a gym membership and a cheap blaster. Gets himself a nice, pretty purple bruise on his jaw and a chipped tooth for his trouble, but the store doesn't do refunds, so he grins through the pain and gets what he wants. 

You survive Oldtown, you're a fighter. You wanna get out, you find a way to make a career with your fists. 

That gym is staffed with people who are on the lookout for new hired muscle. Juno isn't interested in being someone's thug, but he makes nice anyway, lets them shape up his street stance so he can hit harder, and faster. Makes good use of that speed bag. Takes all that bitterness and anger and broken glass Oldtown left him and molds it into a weapon. 

He makes good use of that blaster, too. The man who's giving the entrance exam at the police academy gives Juno an impressed once-over, grudgingly admits he's got the sharpest eyes they've seen in years. Good eyes. They don't usually pay much heed to the dust that blows in from Oldtown, but Juno's got a marketable skill, and it just might take him far. 

Juno's twenty, alive against all odds, and he's doing what every kid from Oldtown dreams about. He's pulling himself up that ladder, one rung at a time. 

Sasha does him one better, of course, and gets off Mars for good. Juno would be lying if he said he didn't resent her for it. 

*

At his first precinct, they call him Point-and-Shoot Steel. Half the cops in the unit are dirty and the other half don't give a shit about anything beyond their next paycheck. Juno, he's just happy to be making a living. It's what he does, anyway, points and shoots. Aiming a laser between their eyes is a real easy way to show people he's got nothing to prove. 

It's one step up from throwing rocks at alley cats, anyway. 

He doesn't delude himself that it's doing anyone any good. The HCPD has never been that kind of force, not in Juno's lifetime. You don't clean up a mess by throwing more goons with guns in its direction, he knows that much, regardless of how shiny their badges might be. 

Juno's not good. Juno thinks with his fists, points and shoots without a second thought, drinks too much and runs his mouth off. He's spent most of his life hurting people just because he can, like it's the normal way of the goddamn world. He's never gonna be good. But maybe, once in a while, he can do something right.

First time he shoots someone, kills them and really means to do it, he's in his second month on the force. Kids have been vanishing off the streets for weeks, gone without a trace, and probably half the cops on the force are in on the deal. Superiors try to nudge Juno subtly off the case, tell him that his skills are better focused elsewhere, but when he's got the ringleader of the kidnapping operation in his laser sights he chooses to respectfully disagree. This is what he should be doing, he thinks, and plugs the woman between the eyes. 

The captain gives him a reluctant promotion, mostly to keep him from solving any more crimes that lose the HCPD their back-door funding. But it's too late. Juno's had his first taste of justice, and he can't keep himself from dipping back into the stream. Always was quick to form bad habits. 

*

He's squad captain for one day, and then he's nothing at all. 

Problem is, Juno's sees too much. Sharpshooter's eyes. He picks up on the little details even when he doesn't mean to, notices every time Murphy shoves an envelope full of creds into the middle drawer of his desk, every time Taliesin and Kahlo bring a suspect in with bruises under their shirt collar, every time Detective Hornett pockets the stuff they take off the junkies to sell back after her shift is over. 

He's always had sharp eyes, the clearest they've ever seen, and that's his stumbling block. Mixed up with an ingrained talent for waltzing directly into trouble, and there was never really a chance he'd make it long in the HCPD. Still, it would have been nice to leave on better terms. 

He leaves his badge and his gun on the desk, and walks out into the swirling red sand. 

*

When you're a PI in Hyperion City, you're either a con or a thug. People from all walks of life can find their way to the door of a PI's office, eventually, but the person behind the desk is always the same. Underfed, overworked, liquored up, and desperate for cash, you can make a Private Eye dance any way you want if you write a big enough check. 

But for a lady with Juno's particular skill set, there aren't a lot of options. He's already exhausted police work, and he won't take orders from the people on the other side of the law, either. So he's left straddling that line, despised equally by the criminals and the people who are supposed to arrest them. 

Actually, it's kind of exhilarating. 

He's lurking in an alley, hat pulled low over his eyes, shoulders tucked up against his ears, watching the lights flicker on and off in an apartment across the street. Every once in a while there's a flash of movement, and he narrows his eyes, makes a note on a little paper pad. 

He's shuffling through ankle-deep sludge, wincing as every breath in irritates his cracked ribs, following a distant pair of glowing red lights. His rabbit guide moves quickly, darts around sharp corners with no warning, but Juno manages to keep it in his sights.

He's running with his feet pounding over the pavement, lungs seizing in his chest, head spinning with exhaustion, but he's got just enough left in him to level his blaster in one shaking hand, point, and shoot. 

He misses more than he hits, but every hit is a victory. 

*

When he's standing in a Martian tomb with the world tilted at a dizzying new angle, half dark and half light, blood drying tacky over his unshaven face, he'll think back to every time he ever felt the recoil of a blaster shudder through the bones of his hand, and realize that climbing up that ladder only left him with a longer, more painful fall. Because he held on almost twice as long as anyone ever expected him to, but this? 

This was Juno Steel letting go.

**Author's Note:**

> i hadn't really taken into account how important juno's sharpshooting skills might have been to him so i wanted to. you know. explore that idea 
> 
> im on tumblr @wastrelwoods if u wanna chat

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] moving target](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12114843) by [ZoeBug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug)




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